Goldman Sachs programmer sentenced for code theft

A software programmer charged with copying secret financial trading code from Goldman Sachs computers was sentenced Friday to eight years in prison. Sergey Aleynikov, 41, a naturalized U.S. citizen who emigrated from Russia, had resigned from his $400,000-a-year Goldman Sachs position in June 2009 to take a new job in Chicago. Before going, however, he uploaded code related to the firm’s proprietary trading program from his workstation to a server in Germany and then downloaded it to his computers at home. Aleynikov was also ordered to pay a $12,500 fine and serve three years of supervised release following his sentence.